jazzsequence.com redesign

i’ve been thinking of redesigning jazzsequence.com.  i love this design, i do, and it was a huge project to design, since much of it was written by hand, but i’ve been thinking of ways to monetize the site, if possible, and this layout isn’t very conducive to that.  it’s a good blog layout, and if i just wanted to do a small strip of ads down the side i could do that (and sacrifice the ridiculous widgets i have now), but i don’t really want to do that.  plus, i’ve been really into magazine-style layouts recently, and i came across this theme a while ago and i think it’s awesome and want to do something somewhat related.

so i started a list of things that i want the new theme/layout to have:

• adspace
• asides section
• latest post
• magazine style?
• tag cloud
• flickr stream
• social networking/sharing links (on posts and in block)
• gravatar-ready
• twitter
• rather than lifestream page, link directly to profilactic

i really like what The Morning After does for the asides section, and matt mullenweg styles his links/asides different from his regular posts as well.  i am using twitter tools to feed notifications of new blog posts to twitter, but it could go the other way, too, if i enabled it, and the asides section (as seen in something similar to the TMA theme) would be a perfect place for those.

so that’s what i’m thinking right now.  i’m also working on a website for a pair of designers who want to have a design blog, and my other thought is that i might use something similar to one of the designs that doesn’t get used for their site.  or something based on that.  their layouts are very grid-based, with room for 260px square ads and 125px square ads along the sidebar, with a magazine style and a big featured post area with lots of room for the post body (~700px).  having just discovered blueprintCSS, grid-based design is another thing that’s been on my mind and, while i like dirty, the clean simplicity of the layout would be a good compliment to a dirty/grungy style like the design that the site has now.

anyway, i’m sure as i get closer to actually doing the redesign, that i’ll post more musings on it later.  right now, gavin needs my help with The Magic Schoolbus: Volcano Adventure.